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The General Purpose Infantry Unit (G.I.U.), informally known as the Grunt or Bipedal Robot, is a humanoid combat robot seen in Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Grunts are mass-produced robotic infantry in wide use by most major military forces and even by smaller factions, private corporations, and terrorist groups.

Grunt armies are controlled by a distributed A.I. hivemind network, which typically prevents Cyber Core users from taking direct control of them, although their physical functions and even friend-or-foe indicators can still be hacked.

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The General Purpose Infantry Unit is a bipedal robotic platform intended for security and battlefield deployment. It was brought to market in its first revision by the Coalescence Corporation in 2040.

As much as its much-vaunted advanced artificial intelligence routines that could allow it to operate autonomously, it was the devices' humanoid appearance captured the public's imagination, sparking furious "for and against" arguments on both sides of the debate on the ethics of the use of robots on the battlefield.

Standing at a little over 6 feet 2 inches tall, the GI's form follows that of our own, designed, according to the Coalescence Corporation, to allow it to be able to make use of the same equipment, operate the same systems and fit in the same spaces onboard vehicles as conventional troops.

Due to legislation that prevented the deployment of a robotic weapon system with no human in the "kill loop" - the control process by which a decision is made to engage a target with lethal force - the product was initially a commercial failure; detractors claimed that delays caused by having a human monitor, command and call targets made the robots' reaction times too slow to be effective in a combat situation.

Instead, they found niche roles in civilian roles; security, law enforcement and prison monitoring.

Despite intensive lobbying and extensive political donations, it wasn't until 2048, when the GI unit, already on its 3rd major hardware revision, was declared fit for autonomous operation in a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court.

Unsurprisingly, the other Winslow Accord nations followed suit within months, clearing the way for broad scale military deployment and record profits for the Coalescence Corporation. Faced with a gap in military capability, the policy makers of the CDP were not far behind in revising their own restrictions on the deployment of combat robots.

GIs performed exceptionally, and with construction and maintenance costs falling all the time, dropping below the per-unit-cost of training and supporting a Human soldier in 2052, it should come as no surprise that they make up the bulk of both the CDP and Winslow Accord' frontline fighting forces at time of writing in 2063.

Grunts do possess a degree of self-preservation programming and can dodge sideways several feet in an attempt to evade gunfire. They are typically equipped with assault rifles, shotguns, or submachine guns, and are generally not assigned sniper rifles or explosive weaponry. They also cannot utilize grenades.

Grunts are more durable than human troops due to their armored plating and mechanical nature, and are capable of surviving several bullet hits from most automatic weapons, although they can still be brought down with one or two high-caliber rounds or shotgun blasts.

They are also significantly stronger than a human being, capable of easily ripping a human's limbs off their bodies or lifting a human by the throat off the ground using only one arm. However, cybernetically augmented Cyber Soldiers are strong enough to overpower them, and even skilled normal humans such as Rachel Kane can defeat a Grunt in melee combat by evading their attacks and using a firearm to target their weak spots.

In the missions Hypocenter, Lotus Towers, and Life, the local Grunt armies are taken control of by the Corvus A.I. through one of its hosts. Grunts under Corvus' direct control often behave in an atypical manner not consistent with their existing programming, often abandoning their weapons and charging forward directly at enemies, detonating themselves when they get close.

Grunts controlled by Corvus are resistant to Cyber Core hacking or their higher functions such as their friend-or-foe indicator, although they are still vulnerable to abilities that target their physical functions.